Trump just put Merck's CEO on blast over drug prices — here's what the company's track record actually looks like

President Donald Trump called out Kenneth Frazier after the Merck CEO resigned from the president's manufacturing council. Trump said the resignation would give Frazier more time to lower drug prices.

Merck, a major pharmaceutical company, hasn't been among the drugmakers called out for hiking the price of prescription drugs and has taken steps to be more transparent about how it sets prices.

Merck's CEO, Kenneth Frazier, left the president's manufacturing council on Monday after President Donald Trump failed to explicitly denounce white nationalism over the weekend when violence erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Here's Merck's track record with drug pricing

In January, Merck published a report outlining the company's average list-price increases for its products. Merck was one of only a handful of big pharmaceutical companies to disclose, alongside the list price, the net prices — or the amount Merck actually receives after factoring in rebates and other discounts that drugmakers pay out. In 2016, Merck raised prices by an average of 9.6%. But after factoring in rebates, that was just 5.5% (a rate that's still higher than the rate of inflation). "We've taken a close look at our pricing practices — and we believe we have a good track record," Adam Schechter, the president of global human health at Merck, wrote in an accompanying post in January. "Since 2010, Merck's average net price increase across our portfolio each year has been in the low to mid-single digits: specifically, 3.4 percent to 6.2 percent."

That isn't to say Merck isn't a profitable corporation. Keytruda, Merck's blockbuster cancer-immunotherapy drug that first hit the market in 2014, generated $881 million in sales in the second quarter of 2017. A treatment course of cancer immunotherapy can cost more than $100,000, depending on how long patients stay on the drug.